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(dumb) Broadband questiony

Hi there, Hoping someone can answer a question for me. At home we have a nice 2mb BB connection. I'm not sure what that relates to in terms of up/down but I was wondering... my housemate hosts a small website of our Linux box, it has a few pages, a couple downloads etc. Nothing major, but he often lets people download huge project files from it.

If people were downloading from the box (i.e. using our BB connection) should/would that cause outgoing (i.e. me trying to look at the net/mail/ftp) to be slower?

My understanding was that your bandwidth is divided between up and down stream stuff, but I have a feeling that they're not "physically" separated. I hope this makes sense.

Basically, if someone is downloading from the site hosted of our BB connection, will that make people trying to use the connection for internet slower?

(seems reasonably obvious to me, but a nice techie answer would be great!).

if you view pages you download the sites content to your computer to view it. You use the downstream part of the connection. People viewing pages on your server do the same, they download the content to their computer, your upstream is used for that, their downstream... Shouldn't really make a difference to your internet browsing, unless the modem/router is having a hard time with all the traffic...